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I have been using various operating systems for a while.

I feel like Linux has, in general, from a UX point of view, the worst behaviour when swapping and the worst behaviour in general under memory pressure.

I feel like it has gotten worse over time, which might not be just the kernel but the general desktop ecosystem. If you require much more memory to move the mouse or show the task manager equivalent, then the system will be much less responsive when it thrashes itself.

Honestly, I'ld much rather have Linux just crash and reboot, that'd be faster than it's thrashing-tantrums.

Luckily, there's earlyoom, which just rampages the town quickly if memory pressure approaches. Like a reboot (ie. damage was done), just faster.

In any case, it makes me sad (in a bad way) to see how bad the state of things is when it comes to the basics of computing, like managing memory.



Not an excuse for bad implementations, but since I run i3wm, my feelings of happiness increased rapidly. To such an extend that I do not want to ever run anything else; stability, speed, memory use... Solves (for me) the issues you have.


i3 is magnificent. The same display seems 10x bigger when using i3. As true for netbooks as for big desktops. My old x120 dual boots win7, which is unusably slow and unstable on it. Arch with i3 is still snappy. Unless I'm running a web browser. Web browsers have gone insane.


Use Noscript for browsing on old or resource limited hardware. The problem is the amount of code running on modern websites.


I couldn't figure out how to scale i3 to the high DPI on my Yoga 900, with Wayland on F25.


If you're on Wayland, use Sway instead. It feels so much like i3 that I often forget it's not i3. Hidpi works pretty well: https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway/issues/797. I use this on a Dell Precision with the 4k display.


Thanks!


Use xrandr --dpi 192 (or whichever value you’d like to use) before starting i3, i.e. typically in your ~/.Xsession.

i3 ≥ v4.13 will pick up this value from the Xft.dpi resource in ~/.Xresources as well, which is the more common way of configuring DPI.

edit: haven’t tested this within Xwayland, though. Note that i3 is only supported on X11.


What do you mean by "scale i3"? Just the text drawn by i3 or also the managed windows?


I meant scale the entirety of the interface. I'll try Sway, as apparently i3 and Wayland isn't really a supported combination.


> Web browsers have gone insane.

Yep. I bought a second computer for full browsers. One for dev, another for 'full' browsing (Javascript on) and on my i3 dev machine, I only have NoScript browsing on for dev stuff.


That's what happens when you run everything through 100 layers of abstraction. Windows, for better or for worse, runs most things closer to the metal.




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